Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Persian Rug
Beatrice’s hands were shaking so violently that she could barely hold the telephone receiver.
The screaming from the formal drawing room had finally stopped.
The silence afterward was worse.
She dialed the one number she had been strictly forbidden to call during business hours. When the deep, gravelly voice answered, Beatrice did not waste time with a greeting.
“Please come home now.”
She swallowed a sob.
“She’ll destroy her.”
At that moment, Dominic Gallo was sitting at the head of a rusted aluminum table in a meatpacking-district warehouse. The air smelled of ammonia and old copper. Across from him, the Russo brothers were sweating through tailored suits while trying to explain how an entire shipment had disappeared between the docks and a distribution center.
Dominic did not care about explanations. He cared about time.
At thirty-eight, he had already become the kind of man whose name changed the volume of a room. He ran the Gallo organization with a degree of control that made shouting unnecessary.
He tapped one finger against the steel face of his Rolex. A dull metallic click repeated through the warehouse.
“You’re giving me weather reports, Thomas.” His voice barely rose above a murmur. The cavernous room carried it anyway. “I didn’t ask about the storm offshore. I asked where the crates are.”
Thomas Russo opened his mouth. Before another excuse emerged, a telephone vibrated against the table.
Not a burner. Dominic’s personal phone. Only three people had the number. Two were standing behind him with suppressed weapons beneath their coats. The third was Nora.
Dominic looked down. The caller identification did not say Nora. It said HOME KITCHEN.
Cold moved through his chest. Beatrice had worked for his family for twenty years. She knew the rules. A call to that telephone during a sit-down meant someone was dead or close to it.
Dominic raised a hand. The Russo brothers immediately stopped talking.
He answered. “Speak.”
“Mr. Gallo.” Beatrice’s breathing was erratic. Somewhere behind her, someone was crying. “You need to come back to the house right now.”
Dominic was already standing. His chair scraped hard against the concrete. The men behind him moved automatically, hands dropping toward their weapons.
“Who is in the house? Did the perimeter alarm trip?”
“No. No alarm.” Beatrice struggled to speak. “It’s Miss Vivien. She bypassed the gate security. She just walked in.”
Dominic went still.
“She cornered Nora in the drawing room.”
Vivien.
Dominic’s blood seemed to cool. Vivien was not merely an old associate. She was the daughter of Arthur Vance, head of the West Side Syndicate. She had been raised inside violence and had learned to inflict pain before most people learned how to negotiate. A year earlier, Dominic severed both his business ties and his personal relationship with her. Vivien had never forgiven either decision.
Nora was different. At least Dominic believed she was. She restored paintings. Spent weekends reading in the conservatory. Flinched when cars backfired.
The two women had no business being alone in the same room.
“Where are the guards?” Dominic demanded. “Where is Frankie?”
“I don’t know.” Beatrice began crying. “I heard something break. Then shouting. Miss Vivien was screaming about taking back what belonged to her.” A pause. “Then more glass broke.” Her voice dropped. “Please come home now. She’ll destroy her.”
The line went dead.
Dominic did not say goodbye to the Russos. He did not look at his men. He ran.
Outside, rain was coming down hard enough to blur the lights. Vivien liked knives. She liked leaving marks. Dominic could already imagine Nora trapped in that room, quiet and gentle, her paint-stained hands raised uselessly against someone who had spent her whole life learning how to hurt people.
The thought produced a pressure in his chest that felt almost physical. Panic. He had not felt it since childhood. Since bleeding in the gutter of the neighborhood where he grew up.
At the armored SUV, Dominic pulled open the driver’s door and shoved his chauffeur toward the passenger side. Tires screamed against wet pavement. He accelerated out of the industrial park and began cutting through traffic with terrifying precision.
Red lights meant nothing. The wipers moved frantically across the windshield. His hands tightened around the steering wheel until his knuckles went white.
Every second stretched.
She’ll destroy her.
Dominic knew what Vivien was capable of. She had broken grown men physically and psychologically. She was spite wrapped in expensive silk. When Dominic ended their relationship, she promised she would destroy the one thing that eventually gave him peace.
He had doubled security. Restricted access. Placed Nora inside a beautiful estate guarded like a fortress. He had thought he was protecting her.
Now Vivien had walked through the front door.
He remembered the way Nora looked at him when he came home late. The way she seemed to understand his silences. Her small frame. Her quiet voice. She would not even know how to throw a punch, he thought. She would stand there and take it.
The image dragged a low growl from his throat. Dominic swerved into the oncoming lane to bypass stalled traffic. The SUV clipped the mirror from a delivery truck. He never stopped.
Hold on. The words repeated like a prayer. Just hold on, Nora.
The wrought-iron gates of the estate appeared through the rain. Dominic approached far too fast. He expected them to resist. They were already blown open, their heavy locks sheared clean.
He braked hard. The SUV slid across wet gravel. Before it fully stopped, Dominic was outside with a custom Colt .45 in his hand.
Rain soaked his tailored suit instantly.
The main doors stood slightly ajar. The digital security keypad beside them had been smashed into fragments. Dominic entered with the practiced silence of a man trained by two decades of urban warfare.
The foyer was empty. No screaming. Only the grandfather clock ticking steadily against the wall. Rain drifted through the open entrance.
Frankie lay near the coat closet. The two-hundred-pound guard was unconscious, a dark purple bruise spreading across his jaw. He was breathing, but his tactical sidearm was gone.
Dominic moved on.
The double doors to the drawing room were closed. A dark, viscous liquid was creeping slowly beneath them and across the cream runner.
Blood.
Dominic stopped. The gun suddenly felt twice as heavy in his grip. For the first time in his adult life, the undisputed head of the Gallo crime syndicate was afraid to open a door.
For a fraction of a second, he closed his eyes.
Then he kicked.
The heavy mahogany doors flew inward, slamming against the walls. Dominic entered low, pistol sweeping from left to right, finger tight on the trigger.
He expected to fire. He stopped cold.
The drawing room looked as though an explosion had gone off inside a private museum. Silk drapes hung shredded from their rods. The antique glass coffee table had been reduced to thousands of glittering fragments across the blood-soaked Persian rug. Heavy leather-bound books were strewn everywhere, their pages ripped. Sconces were ripped from the plaster.
At the center of the room, Vivien was on her hands and knees.
She was not standing over Nora. She was not gloating.
She was weeping uncontrollably, coughing blood onto the floorboards.
Her designer trench coat had been ripped open down the back. Her platinum blonde hair was matted with crimson and expensive vintage Scotch. Her nose was visibly shattered, bent at a grotesque angle. Her jaw was swollen, both eyes blackened and swelling shut. Her entire body shook with violent tremors.
Dominic stared, his breath catching in his throat.
Then he looked past her.
Nora sat comfortably in his leather wingback chair.
She was alive. She was not crying. Her slender legs were crossed casually at the ankles. A crystal tumbler rested in her left hand, containing two fingers of amber liquor. The knuckles of her right hand were split and bleeding, skin raw and swollen.
A heavy, cast-iron fireplace poker lay across her lap. The tapered metal tip was coated in dark red.
Her usual neat brown hair had come undone, falling in wild, dark waves over her shoulders. She wore a simple white linen dress. Crimson splatter marked the fabric like an abstract painting.
The blood was not hers.
Nora took a slow, deliberate sip from the glass. Then she looked up, meeting Dominic’s eyes.
Her gaze was completely wrong.
He knew those eyes. He had seen them in veteran hitmen and covert operatives. They belonged to people who had turned off their own humanity to do what was necessary.
“You’re home early,” Nora said. Her voice did not tremble. It was steady, smooth, and chillingly calm.
Dominic slowly lowered his weapon. His mind could not bridge the gap between the gentle woman who painted watercolors in the garden and the predator sitting in his armchair.
“Nora…” he whispered.
Vivien made a broken, choked sound from the floor. She tried to crawl toward Dominic’s boots.
“Dom…” Blood bubbled over Vivien’s lips. “Please… get her away from me. Call an ambulance… She’s a monster. She’s an absolute psychopath.”
Nora stood up.
She did it slowly, with lethal grace.
Vivien recoiled so violently that the back of her head struck a mahogany side table, rattling the decorative urns. She curled herself into a fetal ball on the shattered glass.
Nora walked over. She did not raise the heavy iron poker. She simply crouched down beside Vivien. With her bruised, bloody fingers, Nora gently brushed a matted lock of hair away from Vivien’s swollen face.
The gesture was terrifyingly tender.
“I told you what would happen if you ever stepped through my front door again,” Nora whispered softly. “I told you I was done playing the quiet little wife.”
Vivien squeezed her eyes shut, sobbing into the floorboards.
“Did you think I was making a joke, Vivien?”
Vivien shook her head frantically, terrified that another strike was coming.
Nora stood back up. She turned to Dominic, taking in his drawn weapon and the stunned disbelief written across his features. She offered no excuses. No tears. No sudden breakdown.
“Beatrice shouldn’t have called you,” Nora said, walking toward the bar cart. She kicked a heavy shard of glass out of her path with a bare, blood-spattered foot. “I had everything under control.”
The true meaning of Beatrice’s frantic phone call finally hit Dominic like a freight train.
She’ll destroy her.
Beatrice hadn’t been calling to beg Dominic to save Nora. Beatrice had witnessed the first thirty seconds of the fight and was begging Dominic to save Vivien Vance.
Dominic stared at his wife as she refilled her glass.
“Who the hell are you?” Dominic asked, his voice rough.
May you like
Nora turned, holding the amber liquid up to the dim chandelier light. The corners of her mouth curved into a dark, humorless smile.
“I’m exactly who I needed to be to survive your world, Dominic.” She took a drink. “Now, are you going to help me get rid of this mess, or are you just going to stand there looking confused?”
